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Vincent Carchidi

@vcarchidi.bsky.social

470 followers 590 following 1.5K posts

Defense analyst. Tech policy. Have a double life in CogSci/Philosophy of Mind. (It's confusing. Just go with it.) https://philpeople.org/profiles/vincent-carchidi All opinions entirely my own.

philpeople.org

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · Apr 18

Sharing a new preprint on AI and philosophy of mind/cogsci.

I make the case that human beings exhibit a species-specific form of intellectual freedom, expressible through natural language, and this is likely an unreachable threshold for computational systems.

philpapers.org/rec/CARCBC

Vincent Carchidi, Computational Brain, Creative Mind: Intellectual Freedom as the Upper Limit on Artificial Intelligence - PhilPapers

Some generative linguists have long maintained that human beings exhibit a species-specific form of intellectual freedom expressible through natural language. With roots in Descartes’ effort to distin...

philpapers.org

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 20m

"a market crash today is unlikely to result in the brief and relatively benign economic downturn that followed the dotcom bust. There is a lot more wealth on the line now—and much less policy space to soften the blow of a correction."

The Economist @economist.com · 26m

“Though technological innovation is undeniably reshaping industries and increasing productivity, there are good reasons to worry that the current rally may be setting the stage for another painful market correction,” writes Gita Gopinath in a guest essay

Gita Gopinath on the crash that could torch $35trn of wealth

The world has become dangerously dependent on American stocks, writes the former IMF chief economist

econ.st

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 17h

Yeah I hear that, and I haven't read his most recent stuff. But IIRC the survival of OpenAI was often bound up in the survival of either SV itself or major firms like Microsoft. I remember a flair of "GenAI is SV's last idea, and if it goes belly up, so does SV."

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 18h

I think Zitron is probably right about that, but he seems to have much grander things in mind than just this one company not surviving, no?

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 19h

Vibes of Fukuyama

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 21h

bsky.app/profile/vcar...

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · Jul 16

There's a gigantic weirdo market for Shit Like This

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 23h

Would add a willingness to disagree and be criticized to this.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

A good take from Martin Peers.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

I could also see an argument that ties them both together - an intelligent system, free of our (human) deficiencies, would not hallucinate, could reliably apply the algorithm(s) responsible for its training data *because* it has none of our frailties, etc.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 1d

A bit of an issue is that the leading voices in support of Neuro-Symbolic AI have often made the case for it in reference to "real" intelligence or whatever.

I could see plausible arguments for or against that, but it adds to the confusion - is it for "real" intelligence or greater applicability?

rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 1d

(4) is a LLM a dead end in terms of real artificial intelligence?

most of these arguments are made by people who think that neurosymbolic models are necessary to produce real intelligence -- essentially, a fixed ontology alongside statistical learning.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 2d

Good piece to get your bearings on the bubble talk.

The gist is that economists/organizations are themselves debating this, and that AI risks are intersecting with other potentially destabilizing factors like political pressure on the US Federal Reserve.

www.ft.com/content/fe47...

IMF and BoE warn AI boom risks ‘abrupt’ stock market correction

Kristalina Georgieva and UK financial stability watchdog say valuations are closing in on dotcom bubble levels

www.ft.com

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

Yeah in retrospect, I've done this myself in the past.

Very much an empirical question, but anecdotally, I've had someone tell me that GPT-4o not following their image generation instructions fully was the model exercising its "artistic liberty."

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

The shift discussed from RL in a traditional ML context to Neuro-Symbolic is worth paying attention to...not confined to this research team.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

On the defense angle, this is pretty good.

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

I've always assumed LLM-Modulo is most promising for verification on narrow-ish problems, but not quite as narrow as problems GOFAI was put toward. Boosting accuracy with the increased flexibility of LLMs as generators. Would follow the trend of successful N-S approaches being mostly specialized.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

Yeah this is a good point...I suppose then the question is whether there's any real baggage attached to that kind of talk. If pressed, do people still say it's thinking or do they default to just saying they don't know? Probably varies quite a bit.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

I also think, real progress notwithstanding, the reasoning models extend a tendency to not ask: what is language? The assumption is that language is obvious: a verbalized thought process.

Some thoughts on that here:

philarchive.org/rec/CARTCA-19

Vincent Carchidi, The Creative Aspect of Human Language Use: How Modern Language Models Fare with an Old Idea - PhilArchive

Ordinary human language use appears to be uncaused, often novel, yet appropriate to the situations in which it is used. This is operationalized by generative linguists like Chomsky as stimulus-freedom...

philarchive.org

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

Academically, I think the Kambhampati-led ASU group has been notably level headed about this. (And I am partial to how he specifically tends to approach the study of language models, i.e. drawing first from compsci instead of searching for humanity in them.)

arxiv.org/abs/2504.09762

Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has been proposed as a method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermedia...

arxiv.org

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

My opinion is that calling the intermediate tokens "Chains-of-Thought" has effectively turned reasoning models into a collective Rorschach test that nobody asked to take.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

Descriptively, I think things may go toward something along these lines, at least among the public. They "think," but not like us.

Though it also depends quite a bit on commercial dynamics. Would the general public say ChatGPT is "thinking" if that's not what the interface said? (I don't know).

Tim Kellogg @timkellogg.me · 3d

my current position is, “LLMs can think” is a useful anthropomorphism as long as you remember that the mechanics for how they think are entirely different from our own with their own tradeoffs

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

The 2024 US elections were supposed to be at risk of AI-generated misinformation leading to a crisis. We're about a year out from that, and the quality of the misinfo has only gotten better. Not saying it's not a problem (obviously is), but I think the problem is more about how to judge sources.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 3d

I have no idea how this'll look a decade from now, but yeah, more realistic misinformation hasn't really led to the info apocalypse that was predicted. I think it's just leading to a more banal (still bad) situation where the internet is filled with more garbage than before.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 4d

One thing which I'd be happy to get input on is, just to be blunt, I do find the urge to automate a person's life without consulting them in some systematic ways about it first a little odd...especially if this leads to dismay that non-AI people don't love it. Clashes with virtuous tech posturing.

Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 4d

Agree with the sentiment, but I do think a number of people (not OP) who say "I want robots to do my dishes so I can do art" don't actually want their manual chores automated.

And, if we're being charitable, they may not be wrong to worry about all household chores being automated. Time will tell.

unpaid shirtz dot cool brand ambassador @sam.robotsfightingdinosaurs.com · 4d

i think it's a pretty clear repudiation of modern capitalism and capitalism as a whole that what people actually want robots to do is shit like laundry, taking the trash out, vacuuming, etc, and instead the market has forced robots to be The Future Of Everything. no, please just wash my dishes thx

Assistant HR Director of Antifa @sethdmichaels.bsky.social · 4d

AI HUCKSTER: "i built you a machine that reads books for you."

ME: "can you build me a machine that unloads the dishwasher for me so *i* can read a book?"

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 4d

I'd add that the US govt may behave in reaction to a crash in what we might call non-traditional ways. Idk how that impacts everything else.

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 4d

I think there's ample room to argue that the tech is not useless but the correction would still not be quick.

My disclaimer is that I have no idea how it'll play out, but difficult for me to not see the risk of a painful period of correction.

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